I had mixed feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time. While I had always admired brave little Israel — a sort of David against the Goliath Arab-Muslim world surrounding it — I had also met some Palestinians (some of them Christians) with horror stories about what happened to them at the hands of Israelis some years ago. Then one day, I met an Armenian woman from Lebanon who sort of set me straight.

This Lebanese Christian woman told me that she too had sympathized with the Palestinians (as had many Lebanese) — until they destroyed her country. Lebanon had been the Switzerland of the Middle East — beautiful, prosperous and comfortably multi-religious — until they took in the Palestinians when none of the other Muslim Arab countries would.

But the Palestinians used their new ‘home’ in Lebanon as nothing more than a base to launch attacks on Israel and to eventually start a civil war between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. She thinks that this was part of their plan — and this is why Palestinians came to a mixed Christian/Muslim country and not to another purely Muslim country like Jordan (which was actually the ’settlement land/country’ in return for the founding of Israel.) It was part of the Muslim plan to get Lebanese Christians to hate Israel as much as Muslims hated Israel, so that eventually all Christians and the Western World might hate Israel, too. (Much like hating the Christian Serbs for what happened to Muslims in Yugoslavia, at the same time when we in the U.S. are fighting radical Islamic terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. Divide us against ourselves and we spend our energy fighting each other, instead of fighting our real enemy — militant Islam.)

She then asked me if I ever intended to visit The Holy Land and I said that I did. She wondered whom I would rather ask for permission to visit The Lord’s Birthplace — the Israeli government, or some Muslim sharia government? Because those were the only choices. If Israel gets condemned every time it defends itself, then Israel cannot survive, and Muslim fanatics will win.

The Muslim Palestinian fanatics are not going to stop until they are either stopped by Israel and by the rest of us who stand up to them — or until they totally destroy Israel. If Israel gets destroyed, we’ll be wearing burkahs to visit the Sea of Galilee and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (unless the Muslims decide to destroy that too). And with the Muslim hatred of all things Jewish, most remnants of Old Testament history would likely be destroyed in the process too, if it is considered ‘unessential to Islam.’

There is no peaceful co-existence with Islam, as our 1990s partner in the Balkans, the late fundamentalist Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic said and wrote, though we chose not to believe him. Either you fight them with all you’ve got — or you surrender and get annihilated. Those are the only choices for Israel and those are the only choices for all of us. Our ancestors were not wrong or ‘backward’ when they shut the gates of Europe to Muslims centuries ago!

I personally think that Bush not condemning Israel is the most gutsy thing he’s done in years! Now, if he’d only say the same thing to the Serbs re Kosovo, and to Greeks re Cyprus, we’d be in business.